Mark Hyman Answers “What the Heck” We Should Be Eating
If you’ve ever woken up wondering what the heck you should eat, listen up! In this interview, Dr. Oz sits down with Dr. Mark Hyman in a raw and revealing interview about what is healthy and what is not in each group of foods we eat every single day. The goal? To guide everyone to sensible way of eating for life, that keeps you, our planet and our society healthy. It’s time to take the guesswork out of meal planning and make eating easy (and smart) again! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
And also, you know, if you eat weird stuff like dandelion greens, for example, have hundreds of times more antioxidants than spinach, which we think is so good for us, right?
And when they haven't started to mass produce it.
If it's mass produced, probably stay away from it.
I think eat weird food is the message.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
So I want you all to listen to what my guest today has to say about the food industry in America.
We are told that it is our personal choice that being fat results from eating too much and not exercising enough.
That blames the victim.
The subliminal message is it's your fault you're fat and sick.
We may think what we eat is a personal choice that is rooted in our cultural heritage and our family customs, but we know that the food industry designs our food to be addictive, that they hire craving experts that work in taste institutes to create what they call the bliss point of food, all with the purpose of creating heavy users.
These are their own internal corporate terms.
That was Dr. Mark Hyman speaking to Riverside Church in Harlem, preaching his beliefs on our food system and what he calls an invisible form of oppression.
Which marks a pretty strong term to apply to the food system in this country.
It's interesting, you're so thoughtful about your words.
Why oppression?
Because we have a system of food that drives so many crises in our world today.
And it's an invisible form of oppression because it is driving economic crises through the chronic disease burden, human suffering through the amazing burden of diabetes, heart disease and cancer, and even dementia.
because it is affecting our kids' ability to learn in school, because it's affecting national security, and our ability to mount an army because kids are too fat to fight.
It's affecting even our environment because of how we grow food that pollutes our waterways and leads to dead zones, that affects climate change because of how we deplete soils and can't hold water that leads to floods.
It's just this global interconnected problem that nobody's connecting the dots on, and it's literally causing tremendous suffering and destruction and crises throughout all these sectors of our society.
And what people don't realize, it also affects social justice and poverty and violence and behavior.
And I think particularly in the poor and minority communities, we see tremendous amounts of this suffering in terms of the disease burden, but it also affects the ability to learn and focus and behave.
We did studies, I'm not into the study, but there were studies done looking at prisoners.
And violent prisoners in prison can reduce violent crime.
By 56% by eating a healthy diet and adding a multivitamin can reduce it by 80%.
And that makes you wonder about, you know, what is going on with our brains and our mood and behavior.
I had a prisoner once write me a letter saying, I read your book, Dr. Hyman in Prison, changed my diet.
I realized I was a violent criminal because of what I was eating.
And now I feel like a totally different person.
So you craft a beautiful book, Food, What the Heck Should I Eat?, in order to tackle this in a way that was relevant to the average person listening to us speak right now.
And I'd love to give you the platform just to explain at a time because much of what you're arguing, sort of standard fare for physicians, but there's some critical places where you differ from orthodoxy.
Yeah.
And that's where the rubber meets the road oftentimes.
That gets people really angry at you.
And I've got so many questions.
And the person to your left, my beautiful wife, Lisa.
Hello.
Who is sharpening the knives.
Okay.
I love Mark.
I love Lisa.
He loves you as a person.
They won't be knives.
They might be little toothpick points.
I'm ready.
You feel like you're pecked to death by ducks.
I'm ready.
No, yes.
I think that, you know, there's just so much confusion about food.
And I think there's so much competing different kinds of research.
I mean, even our nutrition science is so corrupt because the food industry funds the majority of it.
And if you're a food industry company and you fund a study, it's 8 to 50 times more likely to show a positive outcome for your product.
I mean, if you're studying artificial sweeteners and you're the food industry, you're finding 99% of the time it's safe.
And has no impact.
If you're an independent researcher, 99% of the time, it's not safe.
So we have to be very smart about how we interpret and look at the science.
I agree.
I agree.
Oh, sure, she agrees with that.
No, no.
I think of myself, I don't know, think of this as a court of law, Mark.
No, the only problem is as a consumer, you don't, that's not, there's no transparency.
You don't, first of all, you're not, you don't have access to those journals unless you go hunting through the BMJ. It's tough.
And secondly, when you do see the studies, you know, if they're in the New York Times or something, no one says this was funded by, you know, the meat council or the dairy industry or whatever.
No.
I mean, it's true.
I was reading an article in Forbes magazine the other day about...
You.
Well, not about me.
Well, I had one of those, but it was actually a woman who worked for the Genetic Literacy Project, which is a Monsanto front group, and was very critical of me.
But there was another article about Environmental Working Group's Dirty Dozen list of pesticides and produce.
And he was discrediting the entire work of the Environmental Working Group, particularly on the pesticide issue.
And when I looked at his bio, it said he worked for Crop Life, which is a sustainable agriculture sort of advocacy group.
And when I looked at who are the funders, it was DuPont, it was ADM, it was Cargill, it was Monsanto, all the GMO manufacturers, big food industry.
Of course, he's going to be critical of that.
And there was no transparency in the article of like, hey, I'm this guy who works for Monsanto and the pesticide manufacturer.
Mark, I just learned that, I don't know this to be the case because it's so well hidden, but 9 out of 10 rating services are fronts.
Yeah.
Which I didn't appreciate, but it's brilliant, right?
If you gotta, I don't know, you make glasses, right?
And you think your glasses are good, but you can't prove they're better than anybody else's.
You're gonna say your glasses are fantastic.
A bunch of non-competitors are second, third, and fourth.
And your biggest competitor, bottom of the list, because they're scumbags, right?
Yeah.
And then you, as a news person or a TV health show, get a notice.
Hey, look at this new finding.
These glasses are bad and these glasses are good.
You should do a show on it.
Yeah.
It's a rating system.
And so I see the depth of perversion.
So let's move past that.
The reason books are written is because it's a clear perspective.
You own your perspective and you get to defend it.
And then people get to either argue with you or argue at you personally, which is often what happens.
If people aren't arguing with you, you're not doing the right thing.
Yeah.
One of the claims you're making is that there is no true consumer choice.
That a lot of folks listening right now who are overweight or feel out of it, and they're blaming the food because they think it's responsible, and maybe they're right, but it's actually not as much up to them as they think about the foods they eat.
That's right.
So when you look at the message from our government, from the food industry, from our It's your fault if you can't control
your intake.
And what we know from the science now is that certain foods are biologically addictive.
Michael Moss wrote a book called Salt, Sugar, and Fat about how the food industry has hooked us.
And he interviewed 300 food industry scientists, executives, and peeled back the layer on here.
And they found that when you look at how they design the foods, they design them to be biologically addictive.
They hire craving experts who work in taste institutes.
They create the bliss point of food, and they create the right mouthfeel.
And it's a very developed science.
In fact, the vice chair of Pepsi told me that they have harvested taste buds from humans, and they have them in the lab where they can experiment and see which is maximally stimulated.
And so when people think that I can just use my own willpower, it's my...
It's my fault if I'm fat.
This is a completely flawed argument, and it's serving the food industry.
It's not helping the average consumer.
And so we need to understand that all calories are not the same, that food is information, that it actually drives biology, that it could change your gene expression, change your hormones, change your brain chemistry.
And if you eat certain foods, you're going to be addicted.
You're going to be eating more, craving more, wanting more.
And so we need to sort of Name that.
I was just at Milken Institute where we were hanging out, and Darius Mazafarin, who's the dean of Tufts School of Nutrition, Science, and Policy, very clearly stated in a group of all the world food leaders that all calories are not the same, and that certain calories are addictive, certain calories make you eat more, certain calories make you gain more weight, and it's really the sugar and starch calories, which is really what the whole organization of our food system is doing.
You know, I talk about the invisible form of oppression.
When you think about Sort of the trajectory of how we get these foods.
We subsidize the commodity foods, corn, soy, and wheat, which is about 80% of our subsidies and others go to meat and dairy.
1% is for specialty crops or vegetables and fruit.
And then that food is produced into...
So, essentially, it's all the junk food that's made from starch, sugar, and processed oils.
And that then leads to chronic disease.
But then, of course, we pay for the chronic disease through Medicare and Medicaid at the other end, and also we fund the food stamp program, or SNAP, which is, you know, three-quarters of a trillion dollars, about $85 billion a year for 10 years.
That is...
The main food consumed there is junk food, and $7 billion of it, or the main line of it, is soda.
So we're basically paying for the growing of the food that's causing us to be sick.
We're paying for the providing of that food to the poor, and then we're paying for Medicare and Medicaid on the back end.
And then we have all these dietary policies that keep that going, and our food policies keep that going.
When we come back, what Dr. Hyman has to say about meat, you'll hear Lisa's rebuttal.
So I've been saving this question because I get all the policy stuff and I'm as angry about it as you are.
But then we start running into specific debates about which foods to eat.
That's the practical rubber eats the roads moment.
So let's talk about meat.
Before we talk about me, can I ask him just one question about food in general?
And not all the policy stuff, but we were just in Italy.
Yeah.
Nobody's fat.
No.
And I lost two pounds, and I was eating everything.
Pasta.
Pasta, pizza, Aperol Spritz.
I mean, I was doing the Italian thing, you know.
And lost two pounds.
Yeah.
What the heck is going on?
In 1950 here in America, people were eating bread.
They were drinking their scotch, which is straight sugar, and nobody was fat.
Yeah.
So what is going on?
It's bigger than just the types of foods we're eating.
Everything was organic.
Everything was heirloom.
Everything was grass-fed.
Everything was pasture-raised.
There wasn't anything else that our great-grandparents ate, right?
And then we started shifting after the war to industrial agriculture.
We started doing more hybridization of plants.
We started doing more breeding, which led to different properties.
So we bred for sugar and sweetness and starch and not for, you Delicious foods that were in traditional cultures like Italy.
Are they growing different things in Italy?
Yes, they are.
In fact, they have banned GMO in Italy.
In all of Europe, in fact.
Is it banned or has it been labeled?
No.
They don't allow GMO in Europe.
It's just not allowed.
In fact, the New York Times did a review of the promise of GMO, which was that it would lead to better yields and lower use of chemicals and pesticides.
And they found that it just was not true.
In fact, there was less use of herbicides and pesticides in Europe, and there was better yields than...
So I think, like, for example, gluten is a great example.
So you're eating pasta and pizza in Europe.
The gluten here is from dwarf wheat, and dwarf wheat is developed to actually be drought-resistant.
The guy won the Nobel Prize, Borlaug, for it.
Great advance.
But they breed plants, and you add the genes together.
So there's much more Gliden proteins in there.
It's also a very powerful super starch called amylopectin A, which is going to raise your blood sugar more, cause more insulin resistance, than the traditional wheats that they have in Europe.
Aha.
Okay.
So I've heard this many times from my patients.
People are gluten sensitive or can't eat wheat.
When they go to Europe, they can't.
So it's bigger than just what you're choosing to eat.
Absolutely.
It's actually the type of food that we have.
Absolutely.
And then you can't avoid it.
It's everywhere.
Right.
And the soils are depleted.
So what do we do?
We need to reinvent agriculture.
We need to change our agricultural processes and systems at scale.
And I think, you know, I was at the Milken Institute and I was talking to, for example, the vice chair of Pepsi and the president of Nestle for USA. And they're all thinking about regenerative agriculture and how do we protect soils?
How do we build organic matter?
How do we reverse some of the damage that we've done in our food supply?
Because it's not sustainable.
So there are some things that the average person can do right now while we're waiting for the world to get smarter.
Because reversing what kind of wheat we grow in America is not a small issue.
And we're fighting trade wars now over these topics because of that.
And I've always told my friends in agriculture that we're actually closing off markets by not being more open to the possibility that there's concerns about GMOs.
And I personally don't even know if there's a risk.
I really don't.
I just think Americans ought to know whether we're eating GMO or not label it, then people can decide on their own.
Maybe 99% of people have no problems with GMOs.
God bless them good.
But it's unlikely that 100% of people- Right.
Are completely immune to any problems.
I mean, vaccines aren't even 100% safe, even though I think I'm strongly supportive of them.
You have to at least acknowledge that there are going to be people once in a while who are inadvertently hurt because of what some massive advance you're trying to offer, which takes me to meat.
Okay.
And this is an area where I know you and Lisa might mix it up a tiny bit.
So it's too bad I'm not next to you.
Now you'll feel the wrath of what I sometimes feel.
No, no, I get it.
So meat is an example of...
I've been caught in the tailwind of that sometimes.
Exactly.
Exactly.
When Americans think about meat, they think about a good protein source.
It's a valuable part of our diets.
If we're trying to lose weight, a lot of folks try to eat paleo, so meat's a part of that and tastes good, celebration, all that stuff.
But it is an incredibly inefficient source of protein.
And it is unlikely that we can supply enough meat or the desired amount of meat as protein source to all 7 billion humans.
Agreed.
So at some point, we're going to have to come to grips with that reality.
And I'm thoughtful about it because I know that some people probably benefit today in their health, they believe.
And so you're not actually taking away something that's clearly bad for them.
You're taking away something that people find better for them because they replace it with bad things.
How do you reconcile that?
Well, I think, you know, I want to let it be 120. Yeah.
I'm going to meet you there.
Okay, do it.
Well, I'm not coming.
And I don't want to eat meat if it's going to be harmful to me.
And I really was thoughtful about this.
I said, I don't want to read what's in the headlines.
I don't want to read the abstracts.
I want to get the major papers that have been done on meat.
And I want to review them.
And I did this for my last book.
I took a huge stack in a hotel, I buried myself for a week, and I read everything.
And I came up with basically three conclusions.
One is, there's moral issues, which are ethical issues.
And if you are a monk, I have Buddhist monks for patients, that's fine.
You can eat a vegan diet if you do it right and be healthy.
Two, there's environmental issues.
And factory farming of meat is an enormous problem.
Like you say, it's not sustainable globally.
We are using 70% of the world's arable land to grow Food for animals.
Soy and corn primarily.
We're cutting down rainforests.
We are using enormous amounts of water.
Probably 30-50% of our water is used to grow animals for human consumption.
And then the way we're growing the food, using factory farming methods where we're depleting soil, not building organic matter, so the soil can't sequester carbon.
Creating methane.
Right, creating methane.
Runoff into our water source.
Exactly, runoff into our water supplies.
We're basically creating environmental degradation through the runoff of nitrogen into rivers and lakes, which then fertilize all the algae, which then suffocate oxygen and kill everything.
Like there's a dead zone this size in New Jersey and in Gulf of Mexico.
And then, of course, we have climate change because we deplete the soils and the soil holds organic matter, which then in a properly created regenerative agriculture system will sequester enough carbon to potentially take us back to pre-industrial times, according to some estimates.
And then the water, organic matter and soil can actually hold enormous amounts of water, so we won't see droughts and runoff.
So it's a massive problem.
And then the way, what we do to the meat with the antibiotics and the hormones.
Right, of course, yeah.
I didn't get to that part.
And then, yeah, then we have how we grow the meat, which is using, you know, grains, which is not their natural diet, which leads to bad profiles of fat, inflammation, hormones, antibiotics, as you said.
And then, of course, the inhumanity of growing these animals in these factory farms.
So all those are real considerations.
Then there's the issue of, like, what about the health effects of meat?
And this is where it gets a little confusing for people because you kind of can watch a documentary like What the Health?
And you think this is the worst thing.
It's like worse than smoking cigarettes.
And other, you know, people say differently.
So when I looked at the data, you know, most of the data in nutrition science is what we call population data or observational data.
You ask people to fill out a food questionnaire every year.
You file them for 10, 20 years, see what happens.
It's correlation.
It's not causation.
And so the NIH ARP study showed that, yes, there was an increase in risk of heart disease and cancer with meat.
And when you look at the data in that study, they basically were studying meat in a time period where everybody thought meat was bad.
So people who ate meat were not healthy.
They ate 800 more calories.
They smoked more.
They drank more.
They ate less fruits and vegetables.
They didn't exercise.
No surprise.
Other studies looking at 11,000 people who half of them shopped in health food stores that were meat eaters and half were vegetarians and shopped in health food stores, both had their risk of death reduced in half.
What about that BMJ article that came out last year, when it was like half a million people they followed, and pretty much the five top causes of death, period, including being hit by a bus, practically, were all meat-related.
Yeah, I think, well, really?
Yeah, it was like...
Five causes?
It was like smoked meats with nitrates were the worst.
Processed meat, for sure.
And then it came down, and then number five was any meat at all.
Well, I mean, the World Health Organization...
Look at the data you probably looked at.
Yes, for sure.
And I wasn't surprised that processed meat was a concern.
Yeah, they didn't say regular meat, though.
Yes.
Yeah, that was number five.
They said it was...
They didn't make a recommendation to reduce the patient.
Actually, interestingly, and I was surprised by this.
I remember I had to do the Today Show over this topic, and I had to really dive into it because I was surprised.
I actually...
Don't know if they were right to make the recommendation, but they very clearly, after doing all the homework they normally do, it's a big, you know, World Health Organization, decided that even real meat, regular old-fashioned, high-quality meat, needed to be also...
Although present grass-fed meat.
Right.
That's the big argument.
It doesn't really make a difference if he's grass-fed or not.
It depends who you're talking to.
But when I was moderating a panel on this actually at the Vatican recently, and Walter Willett, and all these iconic names, and Neil Barnard was on there.
His presentation was all around meat and diabetes.
Yes.
Actually, it's going to be on this podcast, folks, so you can hear his own words.
Thoughtful guy.
He's been a guest on the show, as you have plenty of times.
And, you know, his...
Perspective on this is that there's a good enough correlation between meat and diabetes that we should be at least mentioning it to people.
The fact that most people don't know about it, isn't it self-concerning?
Because then I start to think, was it not a real correlation or is it a weak correlation?
Yeah.
I mean, if you look at the way scientists look at data on correlation studies, it has to be a big effect to be significant.
So for smoking, it was 20 to 30 times the risk of getting lung cancer if you smoked.
That's massive.
For what we're talking about, for example, processed meat, it's 0.2.
Unless it's what we call a hazard ratio of over 2, which means it's a...
Like, two-fold increase?
Doubling.
It's not really likely to be significant.
And you see all this contradictory data.
And I don't think there's a clear mechanism for how meat is going to be a problem.
We know the mechanism for starches and carbohydrates for insulin resistance.
There isn't a clear mechanism.
Now, Mike Groysin, our mutual friend, argues that it gets converted in your gut into a substance that's a vasoconstrictor.
TMAO, yeah.
Please explain that to everybody.
So TMAO is a molecule that gets processed in your gut from certain types of food that can potentially be inflammatory, cause oxidative stress, and has been theoretically linked to heart disease.
When Steve Hazen, Stan Hazen at Cleveland Clinic did the studies, what he did was fascinating.
He took vegans and he fed the meat.
He got them to eat a steak.
I don't know how he did it.
But he got them.
He must have paid them.
He corrupted them.
And he found no change in these markers at all.
But in traditional meat eaters who typically aren't that health conscious, they found there was an issue.
So the question, and he says, you know, if you eat red wine and olive oil and balsamic vinegar, you neutralize those effects.
It's not necessarily about not eating meat.
It's about what your gut flora are.
So if you're a meat eater who eats, like I do, probably 80% of my diet is plant foods, then that's a very different thing.
If you have a high fiber diet, if your microbiome is healthy, it's a very different thing.
So I think we're still in the sort of discovery phase around that.
So one of the points that Neil Barnard mentioned That wasn't Neil Barnard.
I'm sorry.
It was a gentleman.
You have to realize where he's coming from.
You have to realize where he's coming from.
He's a very strong PETA advocate.
He's an animal rights advocate.
There's a bias there.
There's another gentleman, Pat Brown, who's a PhD at Stanford.
The Academy of Sciences.
He's on every major U.S. organization that has the best scientists in it.
And he spoke beautifully.
As an academic clinician or scientist who decided he was going to dedicate his life to figuring out a better way of making meat.
Yes.
And he created a company where you take the proteins of plants and reconfigure them so they actually look like meat.
They taste like meat.
Beyond meat?
Impossible meat.
Impossible meat.
Without plugging the products, the fact of the matter is, it tastes really good.
So when I pushed him on why he would give up his academic career at Stanford to go out and try to do this stuff, he said, if you do the math, look at all the animals that live on the ground.
There are 10 times more biomass of animal in the cows we have than in all the other wild terrestrial beings put together.
Now, I listened to that.
I'm going to say it again, everybody.
Is that true?
Yes.
He actually went up afterwards.
He's also, by the way, going to be on a podcast, guys.
So you'll hear his own words on this.
I asked him about this question.
It went on and on and on and on.
I mean, the amount of research he'd done to try to figure this out.
He was very careful to exclude whales because they have a lot of biomass.
He wasn't talking about domesticated things.
He's talking about the wild animals that live on the land masses of this planet are one-tenth.
Because we killed them all.
We killed them all, yeah.
I mean, there should be 60 million bison in America, which is as many cows as we have now.
Exactly.
They're all gone.
And all we have...
Forget about what he's...
After I challenged him enough, he's getting irritated.
He said, forget about that.
He said, listen, drive across the country and tell me what you see.
Cows.
Cows.
Sure.
You see cows.
You don't see, you know, bison running around.
But what...
What's fascinating is, you're right, and before we killed them off about a hundred years ago, we had 60 million bison in this country.
They were building soil.
That's how come we have all this tens of feet of topsoil.
They weren't creating global warming.
They weren't contributing to all these environmental issues because they were grazing, and that's what these animals are supposed to do.
And there's a whole movement of regenerative agriculture, which is fascinating to me because it sort of makes the argument that we need animals as part of the cycle to actually sequester carbon in the soil by building soil.
I think we can do it better.
And actually, Patrick Brown wasn't, it didn't seem to me anyway, against eating any meat.
He just wanted to deal with the reality that most people are going to walk out of this podcast and go eat meat.
Be honest, guys.
I know you're thinking it already.
It probably awakened you to thoughts of a little bit of sauce and meat.
I joked and I called it condo meat.
It should be a side dish, not a main dish.
When we come back, what Dr. Hyman says are the five foods we should be eating.
Don't miss this.
Since we can't sustainably give the entire planet meat, No.
And it's probably not in our best interest to only eat meat.
You mentioned you're an 80-20 person.
What is the reasonable amount of meat?
And is there a category of person you'd say, you know what, for you, because you've got, let's say, premature coronary disease, maybe you get no meat.
Yeah.
I think it really, like you said, it depends on the person, right?
If you're very insulin resistant, you really shouldn't be eating a lot of carbohydrates.
You're type 2 diabetic, for example, which is one in two Americans, either pre-diabetic or type 2 diabetic.
A carbohydrate-rich diet is not going to be helpful.
So you have to get your protein from somewhere.
And I think, you know, four to six ounces of meat once a day, other proteins, eggs are okay.
Other proteins, like plant proteins, can be well made.
I mean, there's innovations around this.
Dr. David Heber at UCLA is one of the top nutrition scientists.
And, you know, his work shows that we actually may need more protein than we think.
The amounts that we...
Listed are actually less based on some weak studies that were done decades ago.
And we actually may need more than we think, particularly as we age.
So how we get that matters.
And I think, you know, there's ways of making plant proteins more sort of nutrient-dense in terms of the ability to build muscle.
But we're kind of in this really tough situation where the carrying capacity of the planet isn't allowing us to provide this.
But if I'm hearing you correctly, it's the palm-sized amount of meat a day that you're okay with.
Yeah, a deck of cards.
A deck of cards worth of meat a day.
Yeah.
So you spread that out over three meals?
You could eat it all at once and you could use other plant proteins, other meals, but I don't think you have to have it.
I just think, I don't think it's the enemy.
And I think when we really look carefully at the data, it's very weak.
And there's also interventional data looking at some paleo studies and diets which show all the biomarkers get better.
Lean mass goes up, body fat goes down, metabolism increases, lipids improve, sugar improves, inflammation goes down.
So we have to sort of combine basic science with interventional data with these large population studies and sort of try to make sense at all.
So I'm talking to Mark Hyman, Food, What the Heck Should I Eat?
is the title of his new book.
Very well written, as all the books you write are.
Let's turn to gluten, which you touched on as a concern because other than having everyone move off to Europe or another part of the planet where we don't have a U.S. source of gluten— There are some people who have no issues at all.
Yeah.
And those who want to get off it, for whatever reason, will often go to gluten-free foods that are processed.
Worse.
Yeah, they're worse.
So share the advice you have in the book about what people weigh.
What the heck should they eat when it comes to wheat?
Wheat.
Well, the wheat we eat is not the wheat we ate.
In fact, I was at this restaurant in San Francisco called The Perennial, which is fascinating.
It was a climate change restaurant.
It was a How do you eat to reverse climate change?
Everything in there was designed to do that.
And one of the products they had was Kernza wheat, which is this kind of incredible wheat that is very different and sort of more of an ancient wheat.
And it has a perennial wheat that drives roots deep into the ground.
And it's actually probably okay for you.
It sounds illegal.
And it was delicious.
It was delicious.
And einkorn wheat are the traditional heirloom wheats.
But the wheat we have is very high in starch, as I said.
It's very high in gliadin, which is an inflammatory protein.
It also is preserved with calcium propionate that actually...
makes it potentially neurotoxic, and particularly in autistic kids, we see this being a problem.
And then, of course, we spray the wheat with glyphosate at harvest to exfoliate it, to actually allow it to be easier to harvest.
And that glyphosate has potential consequences.
Cancer, it's been linked to another thing.
So, there's a bunch of issues with our wheat in this country.
I think from the point of view of gluten, we have seen an incredible increase in gluten sensitivity and celiac disease.
It's well documented.
We've seen a 400% increase in celiac over the last 50 years.
True celiac.
Because we had held blood on ice for 50 years and now we have it comparing it to 10,000 people from today and we see this real increase.
Again, with gluten sensitivity, same thing.
And so I think it's a number of things.
One, it's the change in the wheat.
And two, it's the change in our gut.
Because of our processed diet, because of low fiber, because of C-sections and lack of breastfeeding and antibiotics and acid blockers and all these drugs, anti-inflammatories that destroy our gut, we've altered our gut and create more of a leaky gut, which is basically where the outside world gets in through this barrier in your skin, barrier in your gut that should be not letting these bad things in.
And that leads to inflammation.
So I think that, you know, for people who have any autoimmune disease, people who have digestive disorders or people who have severe weight and metabolic issues, it's worth a trial of getting off it to see how you feel.
And there are a lot of tests you can do for celiac and gluten, but they're incomplete.
They don't tell the whole story for everybody.
And the best test is stop it and restart it and see what happens.
Alessio Fasano from Harvard, one of the world's leading researchers in celiac, has said that even people who are healthy, who don't have celiac, who don't have really gluten sensitivity, that the gliadin in the wheat can cause this breakdown in the gut and cause this sort of low-grade inflammation in the body.
So I have great concerns about eating wheat for a lot of people on a regular basis.
If you can eat these weird wheats, I think that's probably better.
But, you know, minimizing flour is a good idea.
And if you want to eat the wheat berries, go ahead.
But I'm not a big flour fan because of how it's just worse than sugar.
You know, regular flour is actually got a higher glycemic index than sugar, meaning it raises your blood sugar more.
That's not a good thing.
So if we circle back to your book, What the Heck Do I Eat?
Yes.
For the average listener, they're not going to be able to go get to this restaurant in San Francisco necessarily.
What do they do?
I mean, right now, after listening to this podcast, they're probably...
Confused, yeah.
Yeah.
Do you have recipes in there?
Yes, there's recipes.
It's a hierarchy of choices we make in our food, right?
Ideally, we'd all be eating, you know, heirloom food and grass-fed food and everything perfect, and that's just not possible, right?
So the first step is to get off of our processed American diet and eat real food, whatever that is, right?
The second step is sort of making choices around your individual needs and preferences.
If you want to be a vegan, here's how to do it.
If you want to eat meat, here's how to do it in a way that's not going to kill you.
And then how do you look at each food that we eat, each category, meat, poultry, fish, vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, beans, grains?
How do you actually make sense in each of those what the controversies are?
Should we eat dairy?
Should we eat, you know, raw dairy or homogenized dairy?
Should we eat sheep or goat?
You know, it was with Dari Shmazza Farm from Tufts.
He talked about this fascinating study where they took, like, basically cream versus butter.
Butter was homogenized.
The cream was not.
And he found that even though it was exactly the same food, the homogenization destroys these milk-fat globulins that when you eat them, don't affect your cholesterol in any bad way.
But when you eat the butter, it does.
It's fascinating.
So same food, same calories, same everything, except the way we process it has profound effects on our biology.
So I answer all those questions in the book, and I go through actually at the end of the chapter, eat this, don't eat that.
If you're going to eat...
You know, meat or dairy or vegetables.
What should you be paying attention to?
Give me the five foods.
Surprise us.
Scare us, as you often do.
The five foods that we should be eating.
We should not be eating.
We should.
We should be eating.
You just mentioned, for example, non-homogenized cream.
I always thought just real half and half, but less, you know, tiny bit in my tea is perfect.
That's probably fine.
Yeah, exactly.
But if you've got non-homogenized dairy, it probably is better for you, right?
So non-homogenized dairy, keep going.
Well, I think if we can eat wild...
Einhorn wheat.
More heirloom weird food.
I think eat weird food is the message.
Eat weird vegetables.
And also, if you eat weird stuff like dandelion greens, for example, have hundreds of times more antioxidants than spinach, which we think is so good for us, right?
Yeah.
And when they haven't started to mass produce it.
If it's mass produced, probably stay away from it.
All right.
2% full fat or skim milk?
Well, skim milk actually makes you gain weight.
Is no milk an option?
No milk is an option.
It's my option.
I think we kind of assume that dairy was nature's perfect food and everybody thinks it's so awesome for you.
But I would prefer most people either limit or reduce dairy.
And if they're going to eat it, eat sheep or goat.
Does it make a difference if you're whole grain 100% or not?
It absolutely does.
We should be eating whole grains, not whole grain flour products.
So you mentioned gluten-free junk food, you know, rice flour, tapioca flour, these all sound great.
They're bad for you if you eat them processed.
And do you have nuts in your pocket as I speak?
I don't, but I normally do.
I have my car parked around the block, so I have nut butters, I have cashews, and I have grass-fed beef jerky.
Mark Hyman.
His book, Food, What the Heck Should I Eat?
His newest book, he's got so many, but this is a really wonderful job of addressing one of the biggest debates out there.
I encourage you all to read what he's writing and read people who are writing about him, and then realize there's a middle ground here where you ought to be exploring your best health for yourself.